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Article published In:
Historical (socio)pragmatics at present
Edited by Matylda Włodarczyk and Irma Taavitsainen
[Journal of Historical Pragmatics 18:2] 2017
► pp. 252–270

Meaning-making practices in the history of medical English

A sociopragmatic approach

| University of Helsinki

Genres work through conventions of communicative patterns. Variation in them is related to sociolinguistic parameters of writers and readers as well as situational and contextual factors, including culture. Conventions of writing change slowly and there are elements that remain constant throughout centuries but acquire new connotations. I shall first discuss genre theories and methods of studies at the interface between language and literature, and then provide a case study. The top genre of scholastic research was the commentary with a distinct genre structure. It was first introduced in Middle English in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and became established in Early Modern English, as my examples will show. The transition period is particularly intriguing as the old thought style began to give way to new ideas, and observation proved inherited wisdom erroneous. Commentaries had an afterlife in spurious writings, providing an empirical example of genre dynamics and proving the usefulness of the notion of genre script as applied in this case study. [1] 1

Keywords: context, culture, genre, meaning change, script, schemata
Article outline
  • 1.Point of departure
  • 2.Genre theories
  • 3.Developing methods
  • 4.Genres of medical research in the late medieval and Early Modern period
  • 5.Afterlives of commentaries
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • Primary sources
  • References
Published online: 9 February 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00005.taa
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Cited by

Cited by 4 other publications

Leitner, Magdalena & Andreas H. Jucker
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Taavitsainen, Irma
2018. Scholastic genre scripts in English medical writing 1375–1800. In Diachronic Corpora, Genre, and Language Change [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 85], ► pp. 95 ff. DOI logo
Taavitsainen, Irma
2020. A medical debate of “heated pamphleteering” in the early eighteenth century. In Manners, Norms and Transgressions in the History of English [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 312], ► pp. 142 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2021. Approaches and Methods in Sociopragmatics. In The Cambridge Handbook of Sociopragmatics, ► pp. 567 ff. DOI logo

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